


Seeing Each Other

by lunarlychallenged



Category: Tuck Everlasting - Miller/Tysen/Shear & Federle
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Hugo is just really cute and I love him, he is the only boy who can have Winnie if Jesse can't, i don't make the rules
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-10
Updated: 2018-03-10
Packaged: 2019-03-29 15:11:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13929681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lunarlychallenged/pseuds/lunarlychallenged
Summary: Though Winnie and Hugo knew what people thought when they were seen together, the way they actually felt snuck up on them.





	Seeing Each Other

Hugo loved books, and books had a tendency to love him back. His father, good intentioned though he may have been, was not so good at teaching Hugo about the things he wanted to understand. Hugo wanted to understand the intricacies of policing and crime; the sheriff only cared about the people in Treegap. Hugo wanted to make Treegap into a better, safer place; the sheriff wanted Treegap to remain quiet and unchanging.

The best gift the sheriff ever gave his son was his deputy handbook, and it had been in passing. Hugo had been pestering him with questions about protocol and crime patterns, so the sheriff had ordered the handbook to buy himself a moment of peace.

If he had known what a monster he would be creating, he would never have bought it.

Hugo had been an earnest student in his school days, but not an invested one. He passed with flying colors because he wanted to do well, not because he enjoyed what he was taught. But that book, that manual, sparked a fire that school never had. Hugo realized that he could get books that taught him real, interesting things. He could learn about crime and detective work from his handbook, but he could go to the bookstore to read about psychology or biology or those crime stories that made his heart race when they caught the killer. If Hugo wanted to know something, he had an uncanny knack for picking just the right book to find it out.

The five years that had passed following the disappearance of Winnie Foster were uneventful; Treegap had not hit the bigtime like Hugo had hoped. The police station was quiet most days, so Hugo would pass his time reading books or coming up with plans to change the policing of Treegap. His father, having had his fill of Hugo’s interest in modern policing, gave Hugo the afternoon off one Tuesday. He trekked to the bookstore to find something new. 

He perused the shelves, trying to figure out what he could afford. Textbooks were awfully expensive; he probably wouldn’t be able to afford one of those for months. But did he really want to buy another novel? He never really reread them, and he didn’t have anybody to give them to, so it might be a waste - 

“Hugo?”

He leapt three feet into the air. He managed to suppress a shriek, but his shoulder bumped into a case of books and knocked several of them to the ground.

Winnie Foster clapped a hand over her mouth to muffle her laughter, but he could see the way her eyes glowed. “Oh, Hugo,” she said mournfully. She tried and failed to swallow her laughter. “I’m so sorry. I forgot how jumpy you are.”

He straightened his vest and crouched down to pick up the mess he’d made. “Lucky you,” he said with the smallest ghost of a smile. He was not a cheerful boy, nor had he ever been, but if he was smiling, well. Everybody in Treegap knew that Winnie was probably nearby, even if neither of them had figured out the correlation yet. “I’ve never been able to forget.”

He hadn’t seen Winnie in months, but he knew that she hadn’t forgotten. She delighted in seeing him jump, but she was also the only person who laughed with him about it instead of at him. She sat next to him on the ground to help him pick up the books.

“Are you the Next Great Detective yet?” She asked him every time she saw him, and he had no idea why he thought it was funny, but he always had to fight to keep laughter from bubbling up. Maybe it wasn’t the joke; maybe it was that Winnie was the one saying it.

“You bet. I’m actually who Sherlock Holmes is based on,” he said.

“Didn’t he die?”

Hugo fumbled the cookbook he was trying to put back on the shelf. “He wouldn’t - that wasn’t - His body was never -”

She looked at him, alarmed. “Okay, maybe Sherlock Holmes never died. Maybe he got away. Or maybe,” she said with a little more enthusiasm, “he faked his death.”

“I don’t think that really happens,” Hugo said. “I don’t think people can just disappear. I think there’s always somebody left behind who knows.”

Winnie gave a solemn nod, but her eyes were far away. “Secrets fade sometimes. He left, and the people who knew just had to forget.”

Hugo, suddenly feeling as though he was in the middle of a conversation that he did not understand, decided to change the subject. “Are you here for a book?”

She brightened. Hugo could remember how little patience Winnie had had for sitting and reading books as a child, but she had mellowed with age. Sixteen year old Winnie was lovely, and all of Treegap was enchanted by her. Her definition of adventure, thank goodness, was no longer wandering off into the woods to visit with friends. She was still thrilled to climb trees and go to fairs, and since her mother relaxed her grip after what Winnie and Hugo called the Ordeal of 1893, climbing trees and going to fairs were enough for her. Being inside was less of a struggle now that she knew she was allowed to go where she pleased.

She pulled out a small bag and pulled out an even smaller book. “It’s called The Two Magics.” She waited for him to react, but he just gave her a blank look.

“I don’t really read a lot of stories,” he said a little sheepishly.

“It has The Turning of the Screw!”

Again, he just shrugged. Hugo was not a man of fiction. He had never cared much for stories, not unless they felt like the truth.

“Hugo,” she groaned. “It’s the most incredible story. It’s about ghosts, maybe, but you never really know. I read it in Collier’s for months, and I just had to buy it. Actually,” she said, perking up, “since I’ve already read it, you should borrow it.”

She pushed the book into his hands. Sometimes Hugo marvelled at how much more intense the world felt when he was around Winnie. He liked to read, but when he was pulled into Winnie’s gravitational field, he just had to read. He liked Autumn, but with Winnie, he just had to find the crunchiest leaves to jump on or go with her to find the juiciest apples. He cradled the book, looking down at it before looking back to her.

“I don’t have anything to - Wait!” He dug through his satchel eagerly. He was pretty sure that he had something - “Yes!” He victoriously pulled out a battered copy of The Big Bow Mystery. He usually kept it in his bag; it had been what made him want to be a detective in the first place. “You can read this!”

She didn’t even look at the cover. She was beaming at him; Hugo’s chest and stomach started to ache in a way that was uncomfortable, but he wasn’t sure that he wanted it to stop. “This is a great idea! We can read the books, and then we can meet up and talk about them once we’ve finished!”

He gaped at her. “Meet up.”

“Of course! We can’t talk about them if we don’t see each other, can we?” She said it as though it was the simplest, most obvious thing in the world. When she said it like that, Hugo thought that maybe it was. Maybe he was overthinking, like always.

His smile was genuine, if a little shaky. “Okay. I’ll read it as fast as I can.”

When she left, the feeling stayed. Hugo started to suspect that he might like Winnie a little bit more than he had realized. Furthermore, he suspected that he liked her a little differently than he had realized. And for once, he had no idea what to read or who to talk to that might be able to help him figure it out, since he wasn’t quite sure which part of it he didn’t understand.

 

Hugo had a little skip in his step as he walked down the street, and everybody could see it. Everybody saw, but instead of pocketing that information to gossip about later, they just smiled and went on with their days. They all assumed that Something was going on between Hugo and Winnie, though nobody had ever bothered to ask either of the people in question. As far as Hugo knew, there wasn’t anything going on.

But then, Hugo had always been better at asking questions that he had been at knowing answers.

So he walked to the Foster house, feeling like he was walking on air, and strode up to the door with the utmost familiarity. It was a path well travelled. He knew exactly which cobblestones he prefered to step on, he paused to check the robin’s nest in the tree, and stopped to pick a bunch of dandelions on the way up.

He had been walking to the Foster house every week or two for nearly a year and the house greeted him like an old friend. When he knocked on the front door, Winnie’s mother let him in, like always. She took him to the parlor, where a plate of cookies and cups of tea waited, like always. She then left him alone so she could find Winnie, who could have been anywhere, like always.

When Winnie appeared, it was with lightly sunburned cheeks and stockings that were slightly torn and rather muddy. She grinned at him, a little breathless, and when Hugo grinned back, he was breathless for an entirely different reason.

“Okay,” she said as she leaned forward with her elbows against her knees. “So you read The Yellow Wallpaper.”

Hugo was a little bewildered by everything that Winnie suggested to him, but that never stopped him from reading the stories. She was drawn toward some awfully dark themes, constantly having him read about the dangers of gender inequality, both traditionalism and progress, and mysteries that could either be supernatural or mental. Her favorites, he had found, had to do with monsters.   
Specifically, people who had been changed into monstrous states. She had spent hours after he read Good Lady Ducayne talking about the dangers of wanting eternal life. It was bewildering and enchanting and generally far over Hugo’s head, who was better at memorizing than analyzing, and he always looked forward to coming back.

Sometime between the debate over whether the narrator died at the end and Hugo convincing Winnie to show him what “creeping” looked like, he had given her the dandelions so she could make a flower crown. She did so effortlessly, nimble fingers knotting the stems without breaking a single one. He wore it without complaint; anybody who knew Winnie knew that there was no point in arguing, and if he had been truly bothered, he would never have picked her the flowers in the first place.

By the time they had finished talking, the sun was going down. She walked him out to the front gate, telling him that the baker had the most divine apple turnovers and that they would change his life.

“Winnie?”

“Yes?” She looked at him with a little surprise. Usually they didn’t do much with goodbyes, so they would just time the end of a conversation so it lined up to the time they reached the fence. Now he stood on the other side of the closed fence, but he did not walk away. 

“Can I see you again?” He fiddled with the bottom of his vest and his lips trembled a bit, but his eyes were grounded.

She smiled, confused. “What do you mean? We see each other all the - oh.” Oh, indeed. Winnie, though seventeen and an only child, did not spend much time dwelling on the possibility of romance. She had not been thinking of how it would look when she first invited him to visit so they could talk about books. She had not thought much of the way people looked at the two of them in town, as though they were the sweetest, most inevitable couple. After all, she heard them say, he did find her in the woods all those years ago. 

She had not thought much of romance, but now, looking at the ever earnest Hugo standing at her gate, she thought of how he must have interpreted everything. She thought of how foolish she had been in not considering it at all. As she wondered to herself if she would have avoided inviting him over had she known how he would see it, she looked into his eyes. He looked a little childish in that moment, more childish than she had ever seen him. Not because he looked young or immature, no, but because he looked hopeful. As she watched him readjust his flower crown, she decided that no, she would not have changed a thing.

“I would love to see you again,” she said, and for the first time since leaving the Tucks, there was not a single part of her that worried that she was making the wrong choice by staying and growing.

He smiled at her, slow and lovely. “That’s the nicest thing anybody has ever said to me.”

Maybe it was improper for her to kiss him then, but nothing about Winnie Foster had ever been proper. It was one of the things he had always loved about her, so Hugo would not have changed a thing about their first kiss. He memorized everything about it; the way the rough wood of the fence bit into the soft flesh of his hands as he leaned into it, how soft her hands were against his cheeks, and the way his breath caught when he pulled away, almost like he was looking at her for the first time all over again. The way he felt then was not something he had ever read about it, but it felt a little like he had known it all along anyway.


End file.
